€135 every 3 months

E-Cycles RTX Membership

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E-Cycles is the fastest photorealistic renderer for Blender. You can get up to 2.5x faster path tracing out of the box. E-Cycles is as easy to install as unpacking a zip and is 100% compatible with Blender/Cycles.
Get it now and save both money and a huge amount of time. Using the
fast profile, the RTX version is even up to 4.7x faster than the OptiX
version of Cycles!

E-Cycles RTX Membership is available based on latest stable Blender and latest master.You can find other versions here https://gumroad.com/ECycles

E-Cycles is extremely fast and flexible

Path
tracing gives very good results but is often slow, has a lot of
settings and requires expensive hardware. Render farms require long
uploads and downloads, are limited to some Blender versions and are
expensive in the long term. Real-time renderers are fast but have a
limited quality level regarding lightning and complexity, they also
require a lot of manual tricks, which brake when the scene is changed,
sometimes even with a simple camera move. They also require to tweak the
scene when coming from Cycles.

E-Cycles is fast, stable and simple to use.
Out of the box, it's most of the time like doubling your GPU power. So
if you have a GTX 1070, you get 260€ worth of GPU power, with a 2080Ti,
above 1000€ worth of GPU power. By selecting a render preset, and using
the new AI denoiser, you can even get much more with only 3 clicks.

E-Cycles
is very fast and flexible. In a few clicks, you can switch from Eevee
quality level (while being often faster than Eevee) to very realistic
rendering. Perfect to adapt to your client's needs with a single
solution.

Scene by Entity Designer and rendered with E-Cycles

Which version is best for me?

The standard version of E-Cycles works on any CUDA
capable card supported by Blender. It's about 2x faster and offers the
full feature of Blender CUDA with adaptive sampling and dithered sobol
on top. It's the recommended version if you have GTX cards only or if
you need features available only with CUDA in all your projects.

The RTX version includes the standard version, plus a very fast version specifically made for RTX cards to take advantage of NVidia's hardware acceleration. It uses OptiX
and as such also has the same limitations (see "E-Cycles RTX known
limitations at the bottom). As the normal version of E-Cylces with full
feature set is included, you have the best tool for every project. It's
the recommended version if you have RTX cards.

How does it work?

Thanks to code optimizations (for efficient memory access and better usage of the massive core count of GPUs), using E-cycles on average is like doubling your GPU(s) count. You can just hit render and already benefit from up to 2.5x faster path tracing with the same image quality (first tests of E-Cycles RTX 2020 show up to 4x faster rendering).

Some new optional features allow up to 15x faster path tracing.
Thanks to a new preset system, you can quickly choose between good
looking renders done in seconds and high-quality photorealistic
renderings. Does your client want more realism? 2 clicks to select a
profile, hit render, done.

You want to render fast, the render
time for the following render went from 5 minutes to 9 seconds on a
single 2080Ti. A tutorial and the according presets are included to
quickly get the same results.

With E-Cycles you get support and weekly builds based on the latest and greatest Blender. E-Cycles
is available for Windows, Mac and Linux*. Both versions are perpetual
license and will give you access to all the 2019 updates. If you prefer
monthly subscription, you can get 2.8x here: https://gumroad.com/l/vkTeQ

E-Cycles helps you:

-
save a lot of time and money by rendering faster with the same quality.
The mean speed-up for the path tracing phase is around 2x out of the
box when using CUDA GPUs. Thanks to a new sampling strategy, the noise
level is even lower at same sample count compared to vanilla Cycles

-
render very fast fly-through (2.79x only for now) by computing the
pre-processing phase only once when doing fly-through, where only the
camera moves

- or improve your renders quality while rendering in the same time as before, using for example more bounces and caustics

- or go to the next step with videos and VR, thanks to new presets to render up to 15x faster.

-
render very clean preview images thanks to a new AI denoiser that gives
great results on still images starting at 16 samples. Really helpful
for quick feedback with your clients and baking

Example
with E-Cycles AI denoiser and 4x less sample to render 4x faster while
retaining more details. Comparison by Marvin Lübke.

-
save human time by using auto tile size and quick quality presets.
Shorter setup time and faster rendering means it's easier to adapt to
changes and deliver projects on time. E-Cycles can save you on tight
deadlines.

- spare a lot on your electricity bill thanks to shorter render times

-
get more out of your current GPU and keep your hardware on a budget.
Buying another 1080Ti for example cost about 800€ and you may have to
buy another power supply (+100€). So in this case with E-Cycles you can
spare 800+100-85 = 815€

E-Cycles is easy to use

Render faster out of the box with the same quality:

2.5x faster rendering by just clicking "render" and 4.4x faster after 2 clicks to select a profile.

E-Cycles is regularly updated:

On
top of the weekly updates, there is one optimization or new feature per
month planned (= 12 for 2019). Here is the changelog since January
until now:

New
option based on the scrambling distance patch from Lukas Stockner,
allows to render up to 40% faster (on top of existing speedup).

Uses half the memory when denoising with all passes (transmission and SSS included).

New
AI denoiser addon which can now generate denoising node trees in one
click, even in complex scenarios and with very high quality.

May Update:

E-Cycles
2.8x got 2 improvements ported from the 2.79x branch. Memory usage is
reduced in most scenes, allowing to fit bigger scenes in the GPU memory.
Rendering is also around 10% faster compared to the April update.

Both
the 2.8x and 2.79x versions can render up to 2x faster when using the
old denoiser (the one from Blender) on multi-GPU setups.

Updated to latest Open Image Denoise, using 38% less memory to denoise.

June Update:

E-Cycles
will automatically choose memory efficient code path depending on the
scene, using up to 40% less memory than master/buildbots (BMW scene on a
2080Ti goes from 2GB on buildbots to 1.2GB memory usage in E-Cycles).

An
option to force one memory efficient option has also been added. It
makes transparent shadows optional. Render times can be greatly reduced
in some scenes.

July Update:

The AI denoiser tree generation has been improved and has a better auto layout now.

Adaptive
sampling is now available for CUDA and can bring some good speedup in
selected scenarios. Own test on smoke+fire shows up to 2.5x faster
rendering compared to the June update. (Although only CUDA is officially
supported, OpenCL users also report noticeable speed-up)

August Update:

Based on the official 2.80 version.

AI denoiser updated to 1.0. It allows to denoise renders of any size with low memory usage.

New
buttons for quick background command line render. You can then close
the UI, which gives better stability, makes more memory available for
your scene and also speed-up render in many case.

- Baking is now up to 20x faster by taking smart decision for optimal performance.

- Baking will require a bit less memory too.

October update:

Added a remove double modifier.

Added an experimental bridge modifier.

Added bevel and crease weight to the boolean modifier for non-destructive and easy to use bevel after boolean.

Added light groups patch from Lukas Stockner (experimental).

November update:

out of core Rendering for RTX (speed limited by system Ram, may require Quadros or Teslas for good performance)

much faster rendering for RTX

further optimizations for CUDA

December update:

Pre-processing optimizations

Update stable build to 2.81a

Adds 2.82 builds

January 2020 update:

Viewport denoising for the RTX version (original patch from P.Mours @Nvidia)

Add experimental support for GTX cards in the RTX builds, including viewport denoising.

February/March 2020 update:

Very fast volume rendering.

OpenVDB import preview builds.

April 2020 update:

Faster viewport rendering

AO and Clay kernel for very fast previews

NVLink
support to stack memory on multi-GPU configurations. Allows to nearly
double the size of your scenes while being much faster than with system
memory.

New presets with improved performance and quality

Improved UI

easy switch between CUDA and OptiX

Use all your add-ons

E-Cycles
is 100% compatible with Blender and is synced every week with the
official version. It means you can use all your beloved add-ons for the
version you choosed (2.79x and/or 2.8x). Here is an example from Alleyne
Studio using Graswald and Pro-lighning skies with E-Cycles:

Users of E-Cycles:

Alleyne Studio, you can see several screen recording of him using E-Cycles on his Youtube channel.

I have few thoughts about E-Cycles and now I’d like to share especially those who are unsure about E-Cycles.

Past
week I asked Mathieu to include a patch into E-Cycles. He promised to
do it after he is finished with the May update. I didn’t have to ask, a
PM was waiting today and he wrote it’s already included. And it’s
working. He was and he is very supportive all the time. And this was
true even when I was not a potential buyer. So I do not regret the
purchase of the perpetual license at all. Keep going this way!

Rendered with E-Cycles:

Renders by EntityDesigner:

Renders by Albert Shamseev:

Walk-through of some Evermotion Scenes using the new AI denoiser:

Rendered in 23seconds per frame on a single 1080Ti:

Here
is a comparison of Blender and E-Cycles made by Tibor from
Boostclock.com, the E-Cycles optimisation was as simple as selecting a
profile, activate persistent data and AI denoising and hit render:

About the Author:

What about OpenCL and CPU?

Only CUDA GPUs are officially supported.

For
AMD GPUs users, OpenCL is only around 20% faster at the moment and is
still being worked on. CPU is like in official Blender. You can still
benefit from the new AI denoiser on all platforms. You can see the AI
denoiser compared to other ones here and here or a 7sec render of the BMW scene with AI denoising here. Here you can see an AMD user using E-Cycles successfully too.

If
you want to use E-Cycles with CPU or OpenCL, I gathered some user tips
in the documentation to get the best experience possible.

Pre and post-processing:

E-Cycles
on average is like adding another GPU to your configuration. Just like
another GPU would, E-Cycles will make the rendering phase faster.
Pre-and post-processing are done on CPU in Blender and will be as fast
as before in E-Cycles.

Known limitations:

- Support is only for the E-Cycles parts. Bugs found in buildbots are to be reported to the Blender Foundation on developer.blender.org

-
Scenes have to fit in the GPU memory for the speed-up to work properly.
Since some months, Blender supports rendering scenes on GPU while using
system memory to some extent. While E-Cycles allows this too, the speed
of the system memory is too low and your GPU will just wait for datas
to arrive. In most cases, scenes requiring more memory than available on
the GPU should be rendered on CPU

- CPU+GPU works, but is also
not officially supported. There are many cases where big tiles are still
required for GPU rendering, while CPU rendering requires small tiles.
Only the GPU will be faster with E-Cycles. The documentation lists some
user's tips if you still want to use your CPU for rendering with
E-Cycles and want optimal performance in this scenario.

-
Multi-GPU configurations and denoising: their is a bug in Blender 2.8x
currently when using multiple GPUs with CUDA and the old denoiser or
it's passes. It can slow down rendering. Please use the AI denoiser
instead at default settings or E-Cycles RTX if you have multiple GPUs.

-
Low samples renders (under 64 samples per pixel): E-Cycles produces
higher quality samples (lower noise at same sample count). At comparable
noise level, E-cycles is around 2x faster, but at low samples you may
have to tweak your sample count manually. Earlier version of E-Cycles
had automatic sample count for such case, but it was decided after
feedback from users to let the user decide if they want a cleaner render
or a faster one in this case.

- The out-of-the-box speed-up is
mainly for Path Tracing. Branched Path Tracing may also benefit from a
speed-up, but it may vary depending on the scene.

- E-Cycles is
shipped with a full version of Blender until there is a proper render
Engine API allowing good integration of external renderer.

E-Cycles RTX known limitations:

- Some features are not supported. If you need those, please use regular E-Cycles (included when you buy the RTX version):

- Volumetrics (works, but may be slow),

- Branched Path Tracing

- Raytracing nodes (Bevel and AO)

- Baking

- Dithered sobol and adaptive sampling

- first render takes more time due to kernel compilation.

- no CPU+GPU rendering

The
standard version of E-Cylces is included in the RTX variant, so that
you can always use the best tool for each of your projects.

System requirements:

Same as Blender plus:

-
Any NVidia GPU supported by Blender. (Although only NVidia GPUs are
officially supported, many users now use E-Cylces on CPU or AMD GPUs. I
added some user tips in the documentation about it)

- a 64bit version of Windows, MacOS or Linux supported by Blender.

*The
Linux version of official Blender builds is faster as the Windows one.
For E-Cycles, all systems have about the same speed. So the speed-up may
be relatively smaller on Linux by about 10-20%. It means the mean
speed-up should be around 1.7x instead of 2x.